Thursday, August 26, 2010

Alpha 4.1 release!

Release party! Download + Video (+ bunch of bugs)!


Download
http://www.mediafire.com/?2s4kecd284w0vd9

Video
"Let's Play" style, part of a new serie.
Have fun watching me fumbling, bumbling, mumbling and dying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8wmV1O_kgRg


Changelog
ALPHA 4.1 CHANGES
-----------------
Overview:
- Intel fix.
- Ingame help for new players (advisor, item ui help)
- The Hospital (building, map).
- Grenades (action, item).
- Canned Food (item).
- Civilians tips (AI).
- Hardy (skill).
- Late game ally (actor).
- Order to: build fortifications, report events (follower).
- Initiate trade (action).
- Share flashlight FoV bonus (rules).
- Various AI improvements.
- Redone difficulty computation (options).
- Log file to help bugs fixing.


FIXED BUGS
- Fixed crash and missing minimap on Intel video cards! Hurray!
- Fixed crash when attempting to build fortifications on walls.
- Gangstas raid was never triggered.
- Quit quits.
- Day 28 is Day 28.
- Modified starved zombification chance option appears in post mortem.
- Resized skill table so it always fits the screen.
- Jumpables objects do not block exits for actor who can jump.
- Fixed UI glitch where you could look at your inventory when pointing the mouse out of the map.
- Police Station TPWSNB won't trigger if he/she is sleeping.
- Crossbows won't jam anymore.
- Various bugs related to loading a game within a game (achievements, ghost characters...)
- When you die, doesn't wait for the turn to end to go back to the main menu.

PERFORMANCE
- Reduced average save and load time by 20% to 30%.
  Remember that pushing the options too far, especially city and district size, has a significant impact on performance.

GAMEPLAY
Map
- New Unique Maps & building : Hospital.
- Some civilians have stored weapons in their basements (rare).
Actor
- New Unique enemy.
- New recruitable late game ally.
- 2 new factions for the new actors.
Action
- New Action : throw grenades - blow up people and objects. Watch out for chain reactions.
- New Action : initiate trade - offer an item to trade.
Items
- New Item : Grenade.
- New Item : Canned Food.
- New Item : Combat Knife.
- New Unique Item.
- Some rare items are unbreakable and never get destroyed.
- Unique items are never destroyed.
- Wooden planks stacking limit up to 4 (was 3).
Sleeping
- Increased chances to heal when on sleeping a couch (5% vs 3%).
Skill
- New Skill : Hardy - Sleep can heal anywhere (no bed needed), more chances to heal when sleeping (1% per level).
Followers
- New Order : build small/large fortification.
- New Order : report events - which is equivalent to forcing them to tell you their tips.
- New Directive : throw/don't throw grenades - AIs is very cautious when throwing grenades, but you might want another fail-safe :p
FoV
- Standing next to someone with a flashlight on gives the same bonus has having one - you "share" the light.
Difficulty
- More complex calculation, with some parameters effects depending on other parameters (eg: nb of civilians vs zombification % and starving).
  Hard to predict the % effect of changing an option, but the basic effects make sense.
  As reference, min difficulty is 0% (!) and max difficulty 519%.

..And various minor tweaks.

INTERFACE & MANUAL
- In game advisor gives hints to help new players learn the basics - it's on by default.
- Bunch of advisor hints.
- Dying by ranged weapons says "shot" instead of "hit".
- Ranged weapons short description tells how many ammo left (eg: in other people inventory and on the ground).
- Shotgun "shells" not "cartridges".
- Items description in player inventory reminds of special keys or actions (fire, give...).
- Shows a "healing" icon when an actor is healing while sleeping (helpful for new players).
- Updated manual.
- Updated readme to mention the logfile.

GRAPHICS & MUSIC
- New gfx for new stuff.
- New activity icon for NPCs fleeing from explosives (see AI section).
- 3 new musics (total 15 musics).

OPTIONS
- New : Show Minimap on/off - special old school 4.0 emulation mode for hardcore Intel people :p
- City Size min:3 max:6.
- Enabled/Disable Advisor.

AI
- Civilians give tips about enemies, items, soldiers or raids they recently saw/heard. Keep your ears open!
- Followers told to not fire weapons will switch to melee weapons (or barehands) - so you can easily set them to melee or ranged fighter role.
- NPCs raising the alarm say which enemy they sighted.
- Leaders can switch place with their Followers - followers AI won't block leaders AI anymore.
- GangAI and CivilianAI followers stay closer to their Leaders.
- Trading AI refuse deals that makes no sense (eg: "my baseball bat for your baseball bat", "my pistol for your pistol ammo").
  You'll get a "has no interesting deal to offer." message.
- AI use blue pills more often.
- AI sleep more often.
- Improved sleep behavior for GangAI and SoldierAI.
- SoldierAI use medecines.
- Improved AI inventory management logic with weapons.
- Civilians make room for food items by dropping stuff when needed.
- Improved AI gear preference (doesn't affect trade)
  - equip best armor.
  - equip ranged weapons over melee weapons.
  - melee weapons preference : most damage first, then least STA penalty.
- CivilianAI and SoldierAI run away from primed explosives (eg: grenades).
- CivilianAI and SoldierAI *cautiously* throw grenades when appropriate : hurt group of ennemies, don't hurt friends.
- "CUF" map : once you visit the map, AIs will be able to use the exit/entry stairs - carefully choose when to open the pandora box ;)

KNOWN BUGS AND GLITCHES
- If you have a bug, mail the logfile.
- FoV is asymetric along walls.
- Rare crash at map generation complains about a missing CHAR Office.
- When changing some options the difficulty will go up, then slightly down, then resume up again.
- Long messages can be hard to read, use the Message Log command to read them in fullscreen (default Shift-M).


Have fun!
And remember, die with a smile!

SLEEPY
I am. Hope you guys won't need urgent bug fixes.

End of post.

18 comments:

  1. yay, good going, nice features. too bad i have my hands full till september, so gonna get to it then ) i like that there is a 0% difficulty now =D cos it really was that way and now it counts as such

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  2. Thanks for this new release! I had great fun with 4.0, and 4.1 looks really great.

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  3. Congrats on the release! I'm going to check this out over the weekend.

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  4. EventType : clr20r3 P1 : roguesurvivor.exe P2 : 0.4.1.0
    P3 : 4c767b4b P4 : roguesurvivor P5 : 0.4.1.0 P6 : 4c767b4b
    P7 : 2ee P8 : 10 P9 : system.io.filenotfoundexception

    error on startup.. any ideas?

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  5. Amazing update! I can't wait to play it. Download going on now.

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  6. This is the most realistic zombie survival game ever made, congratulations!

    Now that there is canned food, I think a nice addition to the difficulty would be if the spoiled food had some chance to reduce HP, like, if you vomit, you loose 5 HP or something like that.

    I would like more skills too, like something to increase speed just a little bit and maybe an acrobatic skill, to have a chance to jump over a zombie in a small corridor. I´m enjoying this game very much, thanks again!

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  7. nice, I was about to post a suggestion about can food, but you read my mind!

    Anyways this looks like Alpha 5 so imma DOWNLOAD!!!

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  8. Awesome, man! Thank you very much for your work.

    A new enemy? Sounds fun. Another GFX to make :D.

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  9. Is it me or are the zombies more agressive? It seems I can't put enough shelves to barricade my hideout, they're always bursting through!! (not that it's a bad thing)

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  10. Thanks for the comments!
    Deon: feel free to check the mod page so I can add your mod ;)

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  11. @Chadda Darkmane: Realistic? Eh. It is pretty damned tactical, though. RE: vomit, you don't think the stamina/sleep penalties are punishing enough? Good on ya.

    @Roguedjack: Any chance we turds at the wiki could get a stat table or something? It was quite a task just getting hold of an Ops rifle, and you just keep adding more stuff to find. =p

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  12. agree with happy, it has been hard to get late game items so that we can get their info on the wiki, i would reccomend emailing me or shoe phone (the other admin on the wiki) any table's if you can.

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  13. "simulate while sleeping" has no effect on displayed difficulty, but it really has quite an impact... free sleeping/healing )

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  14. Before I forget again, an idea I was tossing around a week or two ago is that Carpentry could be more of a tiered skill. That is, you could build small fortifications at rank 1, large fortifications at rank 2, then leave rank 3 as-is more or less. Something like that.

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  15. Can you please make your next version without an installer? A zip/rar would be much better. I hate installers! But I'm really looking forward to playing this. Thanks!

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  16. Ran into a bug; the game crashed when I tried to eat canned food (not the first try, either; happened while hiding in a basement near the hospital). I'll let you know more if I can reproduce it.

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  17. oh wait i read the manual and it seems i misinterpreted 'simulate while sleeping' =D it only turns off simulation of other districts... that also explains why even with 100% simulation districts usually dont start from 0. cos they were simulated in the sleep a bit )
    my bad.

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  18. WIKI
    I'll have to do csv files for stats modding, hopefully in Alpha 5. Those will be public in a Data folder like Resources are.
    In the meantime, good luck with stats hunting :-}

    NO INSTALLER
    The installer is really lightweight and does nothing special but i'll do a simple zip for paranoid people ;p

    JBRONZON73:
    Make sure you updated DirectX and .NET as written in the readme.

    BUGS
    The Alpha 4.1 bug page is open for reporting bugs.
    I'll make a post about the "game freezing" bug.

    All right. Onto bug hunthing ;(

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